Week in Ideas: Daniel Akst

By

Daniel Akst

Dec. 28, 2012 8:38 pm ET

Bad Air at State and Main

Need advance warning of ozone at the next intersection? Researchers have developed portable air-quality sensors that feed data to smartphones, potentially enabling bike riders, asthmatics and others to avoid the heaviest concentrations of airborne irritants.

Portable sensors send air-pollution data to smartphones.
Jacobs School of Engineering/UC San Diego

The system's developers at the University of California, San Diego, say it can also be used to greatly supplement data from sparse government sensors to get a pollution picture for an entire area. With their electrochemical sensors, the portable devices can detect not just ozone but also nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, the most common vehicular pollutants.

BIOLOGY

Kids, the Wonder Drug

So you think Junior is taking years off your life? A study finds a strong positive link between reproduction and longevity.

A study found a link between reproduction and longevity.
Oliver Munday

Past studies have come to similar conclusions. But this time researchers excluded people who didn't want children, in case that opinion might be an indicator of some other factor leading to earlier death. Using Danish data for 1994-2005, the scientists looked at 21,276 couples signed up for in vitro fertilization—a sure sign of wanting kids—and tracked them through 2008. During the study period, the ones who became parents were less likely to die.

In fact, childless women had a fourfold higher rate of death than those who bore children. The death rate for childless men was double that of biological fathers. Adoption was also associated with fewer deaths, particularly for fathers.

The effects remained after researchers adjusted for differences in age, income and health, all of which played only a slight role in the longevity gaps found in the study.

"Childlessness, Parental Mortality and Psychiatric Illness: a Natural Experiment Based on In Vitro Fertility Treatment and Adoption," Esben Agerbo, Preben Bo Mortensen and Trine Munk-Olsen, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (Dec. 5)

EMPLOYMENT

Thanks for Your Degree

A rising educational tide lifts most boats. At least that's the implication of a study examining the effects of a college degree on those without one.

The paper relied on Census statistics for 283 metropolitan areas and found that less-educated Americans get significant employment gains when others in the area have a four-year college degree.

Indeed, a 10% increase in the number of people with a four-year degree in a given metro area was associated with a two-percentage-point rise in the overall employment rate from 1980 to 2000.

The benefit was particularly large for women with a high-school diploma or less. "The results are consistent," the author writes, "with the hypothesis that individuals accumulate greater skills from working in labor markets" alongside highly educated and trained workers.

PSYCHOLOGY

Shunning the Sopranos

People usually prefer leaders with deep voices, even when a woman is traditionally the leader.

Researchers manipulated brief appeals from men and women hypothetically running for school board or president of a parent-teacher organization, in order to produce identical pleas in different pitches. Then the researchers asked participants which voice they would vote for.

People usually prefer leaders with deep voices.
Oliver Munday

The researchers found that male subjects preferred both male and female pitches that were lower. Female subjects preferred lower-pitched women's voices, but showed no discernible preference for either of the two male voices.

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Week in Ideas: Daniel Akst

Need advance warning of ozone at the next intersection? Researchers have developed portable air-quality sensors that feed data to smartphones, potentially enabling bike riders, asthmatics and others to avoid the heaviest concentrations of airborne irritants.